> The system displays the following screen prompt:
> 
> root file system type: ffs
> 
> And then drops me into a debugger. The debugger reports the following:
> 
> First bad, reclen=6400, DIRSIZ=36, namlen=24, flags=5001
> entryoffsetinblock=0
> /: bad dir ino 44 at offset 0: mangled entry
> panic: bad dir
> Stopped in pid 1 (init) at     cpu_Debugger+0x10:    1wz    r0, r1, 0x14

More of the startup output might help here.  It looks like the installation
thinks it has found a root partition with an FFS file system on but has come
across something unexpected while reading that file system.  Could you post
the messages identifying the disks, for example:

  sd0 at scsibus0 target 0 lun 0: <IBM, DNES-309170, SA30> SCSI3 0/direct fixed

 and the line previous to the top one, where it says something like:

  root on sd0a dumps on sd0b

That would point to which disk and file system it is trying to use as root
and maybe give a clue to the problem.

J

-- 
                    My other computer also runs NetBSD
                          http://www.netbsd.org/